Tom Mcleod

Tom Mcleod is a Gwich’in and Inuvialuk artist born in the Mackenzie River Delta and raised in Aklavik, Inuvialuit Settlement Region, NT. His photography is complimented by his multimedia installation work and his podcasting practice. Mcleod began creating from an early age. By eleven, the multilingual book he co-authored with Mindy Willett, Le Delta, c’est mon chez moi | The Delta Is My Home | Ehdiitat shanankat t'agoonch'uu Uvanga Nunatarmuitmi aimayuaqtunga (2008), was published, and Mcleod became a frequent guest on CBC Radio North [1].

Untitled (Toronto at Night) (2019) is a good example of the moody, hazy lighting Mcleod often employs in his urban photography. The row of street lamps cast bursts of white over a road glowing with evening dampness. Mcleod’s mastery of composition is evident in the gothic spire of Queen’s Park, framed in the distance by the lines of the road converging, a welcomingly lit door contrasted with the menacingly spiked top in darkness. 

Mcleod has written and photographed for Tusaayaksat Magazine, and in 2015 was a producer at Tusaayaksat TV [2]. He took part in a week-long intensive art creation workshop at Concordia as part of a collaborative production between the Indigenous Futures research cluster of the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology, and the GLAM collective. One outcome of the workshop was the collaborative visual art installation Mcleod was involved in, Memory Keepers/Gardiens des mémoires, which was feature at Nuit Blanche 2019 [3]. He is a co-curator and exhibitor of between ice & earth (2019) at the Xpace Cultural Centre in Toronto, ON, and led a podcasting workshop in March 2019 through the OCAD Indigenous Student Association. In Summer 2019, Mcleod was among the delegation led by Heather Igloliorte that travelled to Venice to witness Isuma at the Biennale. His photographic travel journal of the trip was featured in IAQ’s special issue on Venice. Mcleod is currently completing his degree at OCAD in Toronto.